Tuesday, March 24, 2009

2009 HISTORY OF ECONOMICS SOCIETY CONFERENCE


2009 HISTORY OF ECONOMICS SOCIETY CONFERENCE
DENVER, COLORADO
JUNE 26-28, 2009


The 2009 meetings of the History of Economics Society will held at the University of Colorado Denver over June 26-29. Those wishing to submit a paper or propose a session may do so at http://www.hes-conference2009.com/.

The conference will begin with an opening reception on Friday, June 26 and will end mid-day on Monday, June 29. The meetings will be held at the University of Colorado Denver - Kenneth King Academic and Performing Arts Center at the University Downtown Denver Campus.

The campus location in lower downtown Denver affords easy walking access to hundreds of restaurants and a variety of hotels in all price ranges. The campus has extremely limited dormitory facilities mean that there will likely not be a dorm housing option available. Conference rates will be arranged with several hotels within easy walking distance of the campus. Direct flights from London and Frankfurt make this a very accessible location for those traveling from Europe. Registration information will be posted in due course.

If you encounter any problems with paper/session submission or have any other questions about the conference, email directly at HES2009@ucdenver.edu.

Monday, March 16, 2009

The protectionist temptation: Lessons from the Great Depression for today

Barry Eichengreen Douglas Irwin
17 March 2009


What do we know about the spread of protectionism during the Great Depression and what are the implications for today’s crisis? This column says the lesson is that countries should coordinate their fiscal and monetary measures. If some do and some don’t, the trade policy consequences could once again be most unfortunate.

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3280

CIS 236 Web Based Teaching and Learning I

Mesa Community College is offering a sequence of entirely online professional development classes to assist faculty in online learning. The first course, CIS 236 Web Based Teaching and Learning I begins on March 23.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

From Marginal Revolution

The most technologically progressive decade of the 20th century

Can you guess? According to economic historian Alexander Field, it is (controversially) the 1930s. Opening paragraph:

Because of the Depression’s place in both the popular and academic imagination, and the repeated and justifiable emphasis on output that was not produced, income that was not earned, and expenditure that did not take place, it will seem startling to propose the following hypothesis: the years 1929–1941 were, in the aggregate, the most technologically progressive of any comparable period in U.S. economic history

Saturday, March 14, 2009

2009 Horizon Report

Interesting project of emerging technologies for instruction:

A wiki documents the project.



Mobiles

A new generation of mobiles appeared on the market featuring multi-touch displays, the ability to access the Internet over increasingly higher-speed 3G networks or by using wifi, and the capability for sensing motion and orientation and reacting accordingly using built- in accelerometers.

Examples include math, music and computer information systems.

Cloud Computing

Examples include:

Media Studies. Using cloud-based applications like YouTube, a media culture course at Pitzer College in California tracks emerging up-to-the-moment social trends through real-time news clips and user-created content posted there. Similarly, courses at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, NY use YouTube and other cloud-based applications to host media that can- not be hosted using resources on campus.

Geo everything

Examples include:

Medicine. The University of Florida has used a 2-dimensional web-based Transparent Reality Simulation Engine to teach students how to operate medical machinery for several years. Recently, the addition of a GPS-enabled tablet device has allowed learners who are spatially challenged to experience the transparent reality visualization overlaid directly onto the real machine, enabling them to use the machine’s controls rather than a mouse as input to the simulation. Geolocation is used to track the tablet and align the physical machine with the visualization on the tablet.


The Personal Web


Examples include:

First-Year Composition at UWF
http://collegewriting.us
The University of West Florida employs between 70 and 90 instructors each semester to teach first-year composition. This website serves as a resource for teachers and students, ensuring that all classes are on the same schedule and working with up-to-date material. It also includes an online assessment rubric that instructors can use to evaluate and record student work.

Semantic Aware

Examples:

Law. A prototype project at the Autonomous University of Barcelona assists newly appointed judicial officials in resolving complex legal questions based on collected information from prior cases. Developed for the Spanish General Council of the Judiciary, the system uses contextual information to suggest solutions to problems that new judges might typically refer to more experienced judges, potentially speeding up the legal process.


Smart Objects


Examples include:

Archaeology. The way that a single smart object connects to a network of information is useful for many disciplines. Consider a student or researcher examining a group of objects from an archaeological dig. A tag attached to the label of each object, when scanned with a mobile device like a camera-enabled phone, would instantly bring up photographs of other objects from the dig, video of the dig site, maps, and any other media or information associated with the area.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Teaching Economic History of the United States

A number of us include American History in our teaching loads. I thought that for those of you who have not considered the FTE on the ground program EFIAH - the info below might be of interest - especially if you live near Ohio or an interested in Vegas.

EFIAH





June 23 - 26, 2009Federal Reserve Bank1Jacksonville, FLOpen
July 21 - 24, 2009Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland2Cleveland, OHOpen
July 27 - August 1, 2009The Tuscany SuitesLas Vegas, NVOpen

2 commuter program; priority given to Northeastern Ohio residents; $425 stipend available

http://www.fte.org/teachers/programs/history/dates.php

Other resources include (for your summer reading)

Hamilton's Blessing
by John Steele Gordon
(Gordon will be the honors speaker at MCC on April 15 - my students and I will get to hear his presentation -"The Origins of American Affluence")

Hamilton's Curse
by Thomas DiLorenzo

One Nation Under Debt: Jefferson, Hamilton and the History of What We Owe
by Robert Wright